As is known in the art, medical first responders perform a variety of tasks outside of a hospital in both military and non-military (e.g., governmental, civilian and commercial) settings. Such tasks include but are not limited to: health assessment and troop training; providing first aid to armed forces; providing first aid to civilians; providing first aid to youth and elderly; and providing humanitarian aid, as well as diplomatic and civilian support. Such tasks may be performed when a medical first responder is in a vehicle or on foot. Most of these tasks require operations where the hands of the medical first responder are actively engaged or the medical first responder's attention is critically focused on some activity. Therefore, requiring help to come from hand interactive systems diverts such responders from their necessary and very often critical duties. In general, this problem exists for all operations for which personnel are actively engaged either with their hands in general or their overall critical attention.
One goal of medical first responders is to reduce the amount of time from trauma to treatment. In combat as well as civilian medical scenarios, the first hour after trauma is sometimes referred to as “The Golden Hour” as response/treatment to trauma within this hour generally results in an improved end result for the patient. Similarly there are conditions of “platinum minutes” in the trauma domain where focused response is essential.
As is also known, there exists a class of medical systems (sometimes referred to as “mobile communications systems” or “mobile processing systems” or “edge user processing systems”) which are used outside of a hospital or other medical facility (e.g., in the field and mobile). These systems often utilize terminal-based technologies and devices (e.g., laptop computers or hand-held personal digital assistants (PDAs)) which can distract medical personnel from the necessary task of patient treatment. Consequently, those types of devices may be ignored until well after an event. Thus, present edge user approaches for patient care often still rely upon paper and simple general purpose PDAs.
At present, hands-free devices that are used within a medical care context are used for one-way patient monitoring only. They collect data from the patient and transmit the collected data to a, more than often, remotely located medical care provider for off-line analysis.